OK, I went through the OpenGL shim process. It worked just fine, but I really didn't see any difference in performance with and without it. I did discover that my Surface Go tablet really just needed to be lifted off of the flat surface it was laying on--amazing what just a little air-cooling can do. However, if people are experiencing heat throttling, they definitely need to do something to bring the device temp down or it will still throttle the CPU down to 400MHz.
I am running the game Windowed, with FSAA disabled and the graphics set to minimum. There is no point in enabling the advanced settings since they don't really affect the performance once you're at minimum anyway. Windows Defender antivirus doesn't seem to affect performance either, although I did exclude the CoH directory from being scanned.
Playtesting with this setup is usable, but there are still areas where it lags. High-activity areas, like where the trainers are standing, are always laggy. The cave and sewer instance maps have a considerable amount of lag as well. Other maps and indoor areas are crisp and fast, even if you bump up the graphics quality.
My belief is that even if your computer isn't throttled, it's very possible that the CPU under Windows 10 is just too pokey to handle the data being thrown at when it hits those lag-heavy areas. My wife has a Dell XPS 13 with Intel HD 620 video, and her system flies through everything with high level graphics enabled. Her laptop has an i7 which turbo boosts up to 4ghz. My Surface Go has a pentium gold 4415y, which has only 2 cores and a max speed of 1.6ghz, and has turbo boost disabled in the hardware.
Final verdict: The Surface Go can play CoH, but it's going to suffer lag no matter what you do because the CPU simply isn't powerful enough to handle the high load areas.
